Note: This essay was written in June 2008 and I can’t guarantee that all links etcetera still work.
The whos, whens, wheres and hows of storytelling
In documentation science, how you choose to tell a story can be just as important as what the story’s about. There is a difference in how we perceive an oral story, a written diary, a newspaper article, a motion picture, a photograph and a political cartoon, even though these documents may be trying to document the same content. It is also important who tells the story – this is especially obvious in stories about conflict, as the document producer’s side (or producers’ sides) in the conflict (and also, in many ways, the reader’s side in the conflict) in many ways establishes which part of the story, which slice of the document cake, they will be telling. Žižek gives a good example:
[L]et us recall the letter from the seven-year-old American girl whose father was a pilot fighting in Afghanistan: she wrote that – although she loved her father very much, she was ready to let him die, to sacrifice him for her country. When President Bush quoted these lines, they were perceived as a ‘normal’ outburst of American patriotism; let us conduct a simple mental experiment and imagine an Arab Muslim girl pathetically reciting into the camera the same words about her father fighting for the Taliban – we do not have to think for long about what our reaction would have been: morbid Muslim fundamentalism which does not stop even at the cruel manipulation and exploitation of children.
Obviously, the same words have different meanings to the reader when said by American children and Arab children. In the same way, CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera will not tell the same news stories, though they may be based on the same events. The German Movie Das Boot is in many ways an ordinary WW2 movie, but it manages to make the viewer sympathise with the Germans, a trait not many WW2 movies have.
Also, the context of the story will in many ways influence how we read it. I once told a friend that I was not a big fan of the first Lord of the Rings movie. “That’s because you watched it on a television and not in a theatre,” he replied. A better example would be the Norwegian fairy-tale “Reve-enka” – it’s really quite an ordinary fairy-tale, about a fox widow who’s visited by several suitors – a wolf, a bear and a rabbit – trying to get her to re-marry. Sad and still in love with her late fox husband, she turns them all down, until a handsome fox shows up, she falls in love and gets married to him. The fairy-tale has always been (and still is) considered an innocent old children’s story, and it is also adapted into a popular children’s short movie occasionally shown on national television. I recently discovered that this fairy-tale has also been published in the “for children” section of the website of the Norwegian Nazi organization Vigrid. That was quite a shock – the text is exactly the same as in the original tale, but knowing that it in this case was published by Nazis gave the fairy-tale a whole new level.
So many things make up the full story – not only the words or pictures or sounds, which will vary depending on who’s telling the story and how they’re telling it, but also an additional social and material dimension: A medium, media technologies, the time in which the story is told, the time in which the story is perceived, the reader’s and the author’s social layer, who the publisher is and which side the story is told from. All stories are documents, and all documents are patchworks, created from thousands of material, mental and social patches.
In this essay, I’m interested in figuring out just how much one such patch – one doceme – can influence a work, by comparing two documents with very little in common: Art Spiegelman’s book Maus, and Jack Kinney’s movie Der Fuehrer’s Face. At first glance, these documents don’t seem too similar: One is a printed book, the other is a movie. One is a dramatic documentary, the other is humoristic propaganda. One is contemporary; the other is describing events taking place more than forty years before the book was published. One tells a story spanning over a decade, while the other tells the story of one day in a life. The differences are vast and many, but they have a few similarities: In addition to being produced by Americans and the fact that they are both praised by the critics, they are also both drawn narratives about World War Two – one is a graphic novel, the other is a cartoon. By looking at this one aspect – that the stories are drawn – in two so vastly different war narratives, I intend to find out how the use of drawn pictures affects the story.
The narrative discourse of Maus and Der Fuehrer’s Face
“The story”, Gunning writes, “is an imaginary construction that the spectator or reader creates while reading the narrative discourse of the actual text”. This act of separating the term “story” from the narrative discourse, defined as “the text itself – the actual arrangement of signifiers that communicate the story – words in literature, moving images and written titles in silent films”, is a wise one, since, as described above, the same words will have different meanings depending on who’s reading them, who’s writing them, who’s publishing them, when or where we’re reading them, and so on.
The narrative discourse of the 1942 animated cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face is the story of “Nutzi Land” worker Donald Duck. The movie begins with a marching band walking through the swastika-filled landscape of Nutzi Land – clouds, trees and windmills are shaped like swastikas – singing their praise to Der Fuehrer:
When Der Fuehrer says “We is Der master race”
We heil! heil! right in Der Fuehrer’s Face
Not to love Der Fuehrer is a big disgrace
So we heil! heil! right in Der Fuehrer’s Face!
The movie then zooms into the house of Donald Duck, where even the alarm clock whispers “Heil Hitler” repeatedly. Donald is awoken by the passing soldiers, says “Heil” to pictures of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini hanging on his wall, dresses up in his Nazi uniform, eats his breakfast (consisting of a single coffee bean dipped in water a few times before being locked back into the safe, some sprays of Aroma de Bacon & Eggs, and half a slice of wooden bread – literally wooden, he has to cut the bread with a saw) and is set to read Mein Kampf before the marching band picks him up for work. Around this point of the movie, the song lyrics start becoming more and more insulting towards Hitler’s regime:
When Der Fuehrer says “We never will be slaves”
We heil! heil! but still we work like slaves
While Der Fuehrer brags and lies and rants and raves
We heil! heil! and work into our graves
Donald’s job is to stand by an assembly line all day making bombshells. Every now and then a picture of Hitler shows up on the assembly line, and Donald must raise his arm and say “Heil Hitler!” to all of them. In a moment of weakness Donald curses inaudibly, and he immediately gets seven bayonets pointed against his head until salutes Hitler again, followed by more and harder work. A while into the work day, Donald gets a “vacation with pay”, consisting of 19 seconds in front of a backdrop of the Alps, which he has to spend building up his body so he can work even harder for Der Fuehrer. After this, Donald gets chosen to work overtime, and after much more hard and stressful work, Donald screams in agony that he can’t stand it anymore, he’s going mad. After a somewhat surrealistic cut scene (which seems to be taking place inside Donald’s imagination), where several symbols from the movie are mixed together (boots, factory whistles, the marching band, Donald, Hitler’s photograph, lots of shells). After this, Donald wakes up – it turns out everything was just a dream – and he’s now in a much more comfortable bed than the one he had in Nutzi Land, wearing a red, white and blue stars-and-stripes-patterned pyjamas. On the wall we see the shadow of a figure with its arm raised, and when the still groggy Donald sees it, he raises his arm and starts saying “Heil Hitler” – but he stops when he sees that it is actually the shadow of a small statuette of the Statue of Liberty standing in his window (a window where the Star-Spangled Banner is used for curtains; it’s now quite obvious that Donald is in the United States). Relieved, Donald kisses and embraces the statuette, saying “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!” In the end, the movie fades into a picture of Hitler’s face, and while a line from the theme song is played one last time, a tomato is thrown “right in Der Fuehrer’s Face”.
Maus is quite a different narrative, or, more precisely, two narratives weaved together, as it is both the story of Vladek Spiegelman’s life during World War Two and the story of Spiegelman’s son, interviewing the father about his World War Two experiences so that he can write a graphic novel about this, while trying to understand his father’s complex personality. Like Johnston stresses: “although these issues (the Holocaust experiences and Artie’s relationship to his family) are obviously intertwined, they are not the same.” Due to the length of this essay, I will mainly focus on Vladek Spiegelman’s war experiences here. One thing one immediately notices in the book is the symbolic use of animal characters: Jews are drawn as mice; Germans are drawn as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, French as frogs, Swedes as reindeer, British as fish and Roma as gypsy moths.
Vladek Spiegelman was a Polish Jew, living in Czestochowa and later in Sosnowiec before the war. In the thirties, he had a four-year affair with a woman before meeting the woman he later married, Anja Zylberberg. After the birth of their first child, they start noticing that the war is coming: The swastika is introduced and used as a backdrop for a couple of frames, and in 1939 Vladek is drafted for the Polish Reserves army. After a lost battle, he’s taken to a prisoner of war camp, where the prisoners are set to do impossible tasks like cleaning a stable in an hour (and losing dinner for not being able to); with only their summer uniforms and a blanket to keep themselves warm. When the war prisoners are asked to volunteer to replace drafted German workers, Spiegelman and his friends volunteer, as though that means hard work, they get a warm bed and enough to eat, too. The prisoners are eventually released, though many of them are killed right after that: “International laws protected us a little as Polish war prisoners,” Vladek explains in the book, “but a Jew of the Reich, anyone could kill in the streets!”
In 1940 Vladek manages to get back to Sosnowiec, where he, Anja and their son Richieu now live with Anja’s millionaire parents. Convinced that the war will be over like lightning, Anja’s family tries to uphold the luxurious life style they’ve always had – the Germans can’t destroy everything at the same time, and with money one can get almost anything on the black market – however, all their businesses have been taken over by Aryans, so they don’t have any actual income except for a few food coupons. Because of this Vladek starts doing black market business with people he knew from before the war, and he manages to get a somewhat decent income from this, but at any time he risks being arrested and taken to a work camp. In late 1941, the occupying Germans ordered all Jews to move into a small ghetto, business became even more difficult, and Anja’s grandparents were sent to Auschwitz because of old age. About 10.000 Jews were later selected to be sent to concentration camps, among them Vladek’s father. In 1943 all Jews left in Sosnowiec were ordered to move to a small village, a new ghetto, taken to Sosnowiec every day to work in the German shops. When given the opportunity, Vladek and Anja send Richieu to a safer place, but he died a few months later. As the Germans now had started grabbing out any Jew whether they had papers or not, Vladek and the rest of the group created “bunkers” where they could hide. They were eventually found and put in a detention to wait for the next transport to Auschwitz, but managed to bribe their way out. The whole village was later emptied out, and managing to hide until the Germans leave, Vladek and Anja hide out in Sosnowiec until they see a chance to escape to Hungary, but the human smugglers betrayed them to the Gestapo. Now they were sent to Auschwitz.
Spiegelman manages to stay alive and in somewhat good shape most of the ten months he’s in the concentration camp. His kapo wanted someone to teach him English, and for that he got food and clothes that fit him. After that he got a job as a tinsmith and later as a shoemaker, as skilled workers got better treatment, and after a while he managed to get in touch with his wife in Birkenau and even visit her there. There were several “selections” during Spiegelman’s stay in Auschwitz, where those too sick or skinny to work were picked out and killed, but he made it through all of them, one time by hiding in the toilet through the whole selection. When the Russians were approaching and the Germans wanted to leave Auschwitz, they wanted to leave no traces behind of what they’d done there, so Vladek got his job back in the tin shop to help pull apart the machineries of the gas chambers.
When the Germans left Auschwitz, they took all the prisoners with them to a camp inside Germany – more precisely, Dachau. Dachau was more crowded and worse than Auschwitz in many ways – Spiegelman himself says that, “here, in Dachau, my troubles began” – and after a few weeks, he got typhus. Eventually, he was released at an exchange of war prisoners. The war was over, and Vladek finally got together with Anja again. They moved to Sweden to get a new start, and later to the United States.
Conflict in a documentation view
Galtung sums up conflict as a simple equation:
Conflict = attitudes/assumptions + behaviour + contradiction/content
“[C]onflict = A + B + C,” Galtung explains: “The conflict is a triadic construct. Focus on only one of the three, and the significance of that one will probably also be lost.” In all of these three parts, we find documents. Most attitudes and assumptions are based on a previously told or written story. Every action of behaviour, even the most violent one, functions as a document, as Barthes exemplifies: “Le mythe ne peut se définir ni par son objet, ni par sa matèrie, car n’importe quelle matière peut être dotée arbitrairement de signification: la flèche que l’on apporte pour signifier un défi est elle aussi une parole.” And normally one will need documents to have the goal-states and the goal-seeking system that according to Galtung make up a contradiction: Say, for instance, that Norwegian corporations are interested in selling cuckoo clocks, and that Norway has no access to small wooden cuckoos, but there are buried small wooden cuckoos all over the countryside in Finland. Whether we assume that the Finns are interested in selling Norway the cuckoos at a low price or not, there still won’t rise a conflict here until the said Norwegian corporations get hold of some kind of document that will give them the information – or at least give them a vague hunch – that the cuckoos exist. The same goes for real-life examples: If we have no reason at all to suspect that there could be oil in the Middle East, there would be no reason to argue with them to try to get it. It is documents that give us these reasons.
In this light, wartime documents like Der Fuehrer’s Face and other propaganda movies become very interesting. By showing the American people how the German people live, we breed new attitudes and assumptions towards German government. By telling the American people how unfair Germany is and how wonderful the United States is in comparison, it becomes easier for said people to identify with the unifying goal of sending soldiers to liberate Germany from the Nazi regime. By visually branding everything that is unfair with the swastika, showing what is going on in German factories and using the star-spangled banner and the Statue of Liberty as a wonderful contrast – literally the things Donald wakes up to after the terrible nightmare Nazism is – it is easier to identify the big bad, the common enemy – and who cares whether the message of the movie is true or not? To quote Ryan and Kellner,
[c]ultural representations not only give shape to psychological dispositions, they also play an important role in determining how social reality will be constructed, that is, what figures and boundaries will prevail in the shaping of social life and social institutions.
Movies and other cultural representations don’t show reality, they create it. Der Fuehrer’s Face didn’t bring down Hitler all by itself, but it helped.
Symbolic characters
A key element in analyzing both Maus and Der Fuehrer’s Face is recognition: The images convey elements we already know, and uses this strategy to tell us a story. A good example of this is visible already when looking at the characters in the two stories: The protagonist in Der Fuehrer’s Face is Donald Duck. In 1942, Donald Duck had already existed for eight years, and he was a very popular character. Putting him in Nutzi Land and letting him wear a Nazi uniform doesn’t change that: The spectator will still take his side, sympathise with him. So when the Nazi regime treats Donald like dirt, the spectators have already been told to hate them. Not because Donald Duck is a very adorable and lovable character, but because he’s Donald Duck. We see this in the secondary characters as well: Most of them are faceless voices, but those of them who have a face, often have a familiar face – for instance, three of the marching band characters are obvious caricatures of Göring, Hirohito and Mussolini.
Maus is an entirely different work than Der Fuehrer’s Face, and its protagonist is not a well-known character. While there is some discussion about whether Vladek or Art is the real hero of Maus (and Art often comes out as the winner), Vladek is the only protagonist of the part of the Holocaust part of the story, and that is the part I have chosen to focus on in this essay. While Vladek Spiegelman was a Holocaust survivor, he’s not exactly a public figure, or more exactly, he’s no Donald Duck. Maus does lack the well-known character Der Fuehrer’s Face has, but that doesn’t hurt the story – for two reasons:
- Maus is a whole different kind of story than Der Fuehrer’s Face, and an important narrative element of the book is to get to know Vladek through the story. It is even a noteworthy element here that the readers shouldn’t sympathise with Vladek all the time – he’s a pretty flawed character.
- Even though the character Vladek Spiegelman is not well known, he still possesses known elements through his archetype: As Art Spiegelman has chosen to draw the characters as animals; most readers will immediately give the character some of the traits given to this anthropomorphic animal. For instance, the mice can be seen as “week and helpless victims”, and at that point the cats in the story, the Germans, immediately become the antagonist.
This use of anthropomorphic animals in this story is, however, a parody, a revolution and a problem. A parody because the most important animal roles are borrowed from the German Reich, where Jews were classified as vermin and Poles were classified as pigs, and Spiegelman tries to break down these differences in the book to show that all these races are really the same. A revolution because this use of anthropomorphic animals, according to Hastings, subverts the comic tradition of the funny animal. And a problem because animal characters can hold different meanings and be misinterpreted. Maus was not published in Poland until 2001, and one reason for that was Spiegelman’s portraying Poles as pigs. The pig can be a dirty animal, and in Poland “swine” is a terrible insult, but Spiegelman never intended to hurt Poles with this portrayal: “in the American cartoon tradition,” he says,
pigs simply don’t carry any particular negative connotation: Porky Pig, for instance, is every bit as cuddly and beloved a figure as Mickey Mouse. […] [T]he main thing to be noted about pigs is that they are not part of the book’s overriding metaphorical food chain. Pigs don’t eat mice – cats do. Pigs are relatively innocuous as far as mice are concerned.
Other symbols
One of the few things I find that Maus and Der Fuehrer’s Face has in common, is their overwhelming number of pictorial signs, symbols holding given values. One such symbol we find in both works: the swastika. But as the two documents are very different in ways of target group and message, they also use the swastika in different ways. In Der Fuehrer’s Face, the swastika seems to be mostly humour-based: At first it offers, just like the characters, an aspect of recognition – when the countryside is full of swastikas, we immediately see that it is meant to be Nazi Germany or a parody thereof. Of course, in the real world Hitler never had the power to shape every tree and every cloud like swastikas – this is an exaggeration, a caricature, in the same way that Hirohito has very crooked eyes and a very yellow skin colour. This exaggeration is very Barthesian: When Barthes says that “[l]a Chine est une chose, l’idée que pouvait s’en faire il n’y a pas longtemps encore, un petit-bourgeois français en est une autre: pour ce mélange special de clochettes, de pousse-pousse et de fumeries d’opium, pas d’autre mot possible que celui de sinité”, the concept can just as easily be used on a swastika-filled landscape, or a swastika-patterned wallpaper. I doubt that very many Nazis had swastika-patterned wallpaper, but it still has a strong “Naziness” to it, in the same way that the star-spangled banner in the very end of the movie has a very strong “unitedstatesness” to it, even though most Americans have never owned, say, a stars-and-stripes-patterned pyjamas.
The swastika is used in Maus as well, but here it’s different: We now have a story about Jews, drawn and published several decades after the war. The swastika is not needed as a symbol of recognition, nor would it be very appropriate to use it for comic effect: Here, the swastika symbolizes a fear, or, as Ewert points out, a brutality. When used in the way Spiegelman uses it on page 35, the swastika is both a looming fear of what might happen to the protagonist in the future, and also shows a lot of brutality without actually showing it: It is easier imagining things being very brutal and horrible when the swastika is used as a backdrop. Again, the symbol is used for recognition, but in a whole different way than in Der Fuehrer’s Face. This fear and brutality is later replaced by another symbol, the Auschwitz crematorium pipes: A line like “Thousand – hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were arriving there at this time” gets a whole new level when juxtaposed with a picture of the smoking crematorium pipes. “This visual shorthand,” Ewert writes, “is so powerful that Spiegelman recreates it three times in fourteen pages”. I get the impression that the ability to use these symbols is a gigantic resource for the document producer, both in Maus and in Der Fuehrer’s Face.
Cartoons and photographs
Prince says that iconic representation is understood in terms of degrees of resemblance, so that a photograph exhibits a higher degree of iconicity than a line drawing. Though I won’t claim that the simple style of the cartoon and the complex nature of the photograph is irrelevant, I think that the cartoon to some degree has an iconicity as high as, or higher than, the photograph. If we choose to use McCloud’s definition of the icon, “any image used to represent a a [sic] person, place, thing or idea”, the cartoon’s amplification through simplification is an excellent example of the icon. “When we abstract an image through cartooning,” McCloud writes, “we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.” The cartoons I have looked at in this essay are great examples of this: It is easy to take a snapshot of the German countryside, but by drawing a countryside humorously filled with swastikas, anyone with the right foundation of references will recognize the place as Nazi Germany. It would be easy to give each and every Jew in Auschwitz a defined personality and different looks, but by showing them not in a realistic way, but as the vermin the German defined them as, they’re somehow easier to sympathise with. And any tool that can be used to twist the story in the direction the narrator wants it is a tool the narrator should know the value of: We may not get Prince’s photographic resemblance to what the picture is resembling, but we get an even stronger resemblance to what the narrator wants the picture to resemble, or, more precisely, what the narrator wants the picture to tell us.
The strength of the drawn image
As shown above, the doceme of using drawn images in a narrative work share a common strength. I have looked at Maus and Der Fuehrer’s Face – two documents so different it’s hard to imagine they can have anything in common – and found a clear resemblance in the way they use visual symbols. Though they use symbols for very different purposes, they manage to by using a pictorial language sum up a very complex idea in a single image, and unlike the photograph or the live action movie, they have a tool they can use for stressing the part of the image they want us to read: the cartoon, and its amplification through simplification. No photograph and no written text can focus on a single aspect of a simple idea this easily. The length of this essay doesn’t allow a deeper analysis of whether all cartoons, comics, animated movies and graphic novels in the world actually uses this strength of amplification through simplification – maybe they do, maybe they don’t – but it seems obvious that even if they don’t, at least they all have the opportunity to. And as drawn images, this is one of their biggest strengths.
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